The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.

“Occupy” is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy, to the extent that the “movement” – HAH! Some “movement”, except if the word “bowel” is attached - is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.

That's about half of it. It goes on in that vein, then ends with a single-word paragraph: "Schmucks."

Rick Moody — who's a writer best known for "The Ice Storm" — uses Miller's diatribe to launch his own diatribe about how Hollywood action movies are fascist propaganda. (Moody doesn't entertain the notion that OWS might be fascist. He blithely links Miller and fascism to the conservative side of the political spectrum.) Moody sorts through the evidence: "True Lies, the abominable 1994 James Cameron film (featuring Republican governor-to-be Arnold Schwarzenegger)... the expensive and aesthetically pretentious Gladiator (2000), which I still contend is an allegory about George W Bush's candidacy for president..."

The types of men (almost always men) who have historically favoured the action film genre, it's safe to say, are often, if not always, politically conservative: Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Mel Gibson, even Clint Eastwood (former Republican mayor of Carmel, California), all proud defenders of a conservative agenda, and/or justifiers of vigilantism....

American movies, in the main, often agree with Frank Miller, that endless war against a ruthless enemy is good, and military service is good, that killing makes you a man, that capitalism must prevail, that if you would just get a job (preferably a corporate job, for all honest work is corporate) you would quit complaining. American movies say these things, but they are more polite about it, lest they should offend. The kind of comic-book-oriented cinema that has afflicted Hollywood for 10 years now, since Spider-Man, has degraded the cinematic art, and has varnished over what was once a humanist form, so Hollywood can do little but repeat the platitudes of the 1%. And yet Hollywood tries still not to offend.

I agree with him that "comic-book-oriented cinema... has degraded the cinematic art," but imagine a 10-year-long craze for "Ice Storm"-type stuff. I mean, if you want to talk about degradation! America would need to be insane in the first place to go crazy for that deadly genre, but imagine. Action is preferable to a suicidal funk.

Moody ends his mood piece with a call for a boycott of Frank Miller's films. Actually, he says: "And we might repay the favor [of Frank Miller's 'reminding us that our allegedly democratic political system, which increases inequality and decreases class mobility, which is mostly interested in keeping the disenfranchised where they are, requires a mindless, propagandistic (or "cryptofascist") storytelling medium to distract its citizenry'] by avoiding purchase of tickets to Miller's films."

As you sort of note, Moody and many other on the left fail to note that "Fascism" is a socialist, not a capitalist ideology.

The Germans have often been called "fascists" (Small f) but they were pretty explicit about calling themselves "National Socialists"

Nazi was mostly a US/Brit term to keep from having to call them socialist.

Do any of the OWS folks ever read any history? Do they ever read anything?

Have they managed to get as far as page 3 in Marx's Capital? Had they made it that far, and had they considered what they were reading, they would realize that Marxist socialism is explicitly built on a mistake.

All socialism is built on the same mistake. Marx was just much more explicit about it.

American movies, in the main, often agree with Frank Miller [...] that capitalism must prevail, that if you would just get a job (preferably a corporate job, for all honest work is corporate) you would quit complaining.

I'm trying to remember if there was *ever* a time when the above held true for Hollywood.

When was corporate America ever portrayed as a good thing? When was capitalism ever portrayed as good? Even the anti-Communist movies generally cast themselves as religion&democracy vs. godless Communism.

A communist writer for a communist rag rants about what passes for a conservative in Hollywood's comment on a bunch of anarchists. Did I miss something? Is there anything new or novel to be discovered here? And frankly who cares what some pretentious hypocrite and boring schmuck writes.

"Does that make American cinema cryptofascist? Is "cryptofascist" a word that you can use in an essay like this? I keep trying to find a space somewhere between "propagandistic" and "cryptofascist" to describe my feelings about Miller's screed. But perhaps it's more accurate to say the following: whatever mainstream Hollywood cinema is now, Frank Miller is part of it."

Brilliant and concise. I can see why Moody is a Hollywood screenwriter.

A point that Moody fails to make, and which would at least be a legitimate criticism of the action genre, is that action movies have the potential to be great cinema, a potential which is mostly ignored by the purveyors of comic book glop. I've always liked realistic war pictures, not because they support any capitalist paradigms, but because they give us insight into how men (and sometimes women) behave under duress. Twelve O'clock High is one of the greatest pictures ever made. Breaker Morant also comes to mind. I don't think you could accuse Apocalypse Now of the things Moody finds wanting in the action genre. I suspect he wouldn't include these films in the action genre, but only because they are great cinema.

Is 'concise' a word that you can use on this blog? I'm trying to describe my feeling and they're somewhat between concise and not concise. But in any case whether Althouse is concise or not concise, she's certainly part of the mainstream blogosphere.

Rick Moody degraded hollywood with his little shit fest "the Ice Storm" which had good actors working of a crappy script. Like American Beauty, it is an emotional temper tantrum by the writer depicting a world that simply didn't/doesn't exist. It is far more phony that action and fantasy films which rarely make any pretense that they are reflecting reality.

Of course, what you really have is a man who thinks very highly of himself and is extremely bitter that nobody else does. Meanwhile a "mere" comic book writer gets fame and glory. Of course Moody sympathizes with Occupy Wall Street; they all believe they deserve wealth and success simply because they desire them and if they can't have such, nobody should.

Moody is flummoxed how, despite decades of effort and (until now) total control of TV and film by Hollywood elites, they can still only get half the people to be like them in the voting booth, and even fewer of them to watch their crappy movies about leftism.

Soviet 'literature' had the same fate, though.

Progressives are always lamenting that people refuse to behave like they ought to do.

Batman, I know as an old comic script. Probably followed Superman's success. When reading comic books was not considered reading at all.

As to "Occupy Wall Street," I'd bet the "idea" blossomed with the misbegotten Cairo "change" that knocked Mubarak out of government. And, has put, instead, FAILURE WRIT LARGE ... on Egypt. Once known as a tourist mecca. With "nice people." HORSE SHIT. Of course.

But that's what started the money rolling in. Made the unions, among others, happy that they could "unseat" something that's been a thorn in their behind because this country didn't "adopt" Marx. (Sure. Academics did.) And, they credential you with worthless paper. Then? They argue over parking spots.

But "Occupy Wall Street" was supposed to work! It had everything they wanted! A private piece of property, that would become LAWLESS! Helped, of course, by an idiot mayor ... Whom, if you knew how much he spent to become mayor ... you'd wonder how this schmuck even got rich! The Wall Street "Mecca" King.

Bloomberg also thought he'd become president of the USA. Because when you own an "asset" like the Mayor's job in New York City ... you can spend even more money and run for the presidency? (As if the GOP doesn't have enough problems, already.)

The media was all excited about OWS. (But leave it to Comedy Central to get the best footage ... with Justin and Catsup.)

Justin and Catsup said OWS had no one running it! They just held meetings (about everything under the sun). And, instead of raising their voices at these meetings ... they used hand and arm signals. They probably picked this up from watching football. But not the players. But the guys who throw handkerchiefs out of their pockets.

Do you know how surprised the "organizers" were ... that instead of breeding like flies across the United States ... They became pariah?

In politics, you never want to become a pariah.

While in EUROPE, society is breaking down over their failed EURO. Because for two years they've been kicking that can down the road.

I'm not worried that Hollywood will do a successful film. Their talent's mostly gone, now.

Like TV. When you can remember back to Sid Caesar. And, Milton Berle. And, I Love Lucy. And, people with TV's put them in their living rooms.

Look, Rick Moody grew up in upper crust suburbia. New Canaan the goldest town of the CT Gold Coast of the 60s and 70s, private school, Ivys. He gets such a frisson of delight seeing other children of privelege rebel. Much as he does condemning the opulent society he was sired in in novels "ironically, and through clever allegory". Disparaging the suburban life.

No matter that the true heat of "OWS" is coming from either anarchists or those cosseted descendents of the well-off now discovering that other Elites have rigged the game against them. And they are caught up in the downward mobility of a declining America..dreams of a good job and a home in Santa Clara or Winter Park outside Orlando let alone New Canaan, CT - are unlikely in their future.

Maybe because history is making Rick Moody's whole schtick about the bored adults of affluence in the suburbs obsolete - is he so irritated with Frank Miller...

Or it could be knowing this comic writer has created words and movie lines that have globally resonated and sunk in more than his boring books and rarely seeen movies have. Take this allegory of wealth and peaceful prosperity rejected for the thrill of violence and destruction:

Alfred the Butler - Alfred Pennyworth: A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never found anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

-LATER IN THE MOVIE-

Bruce Wayne: The bandit, in the forest in Burma, did you catch him?

Alfred Pennyworth: Yes.

Bruce Wayne: How?

Alfred Pennyworth: We burned the forest down.

Bruce Wayne: What did you learn from that?

Pennyworth: "Some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."

The reality Moody hates is that every day people are not sensitized into the absurdity of suburban existence, dwelling on that - but sure as hell are sensitized to resisting those that want the world to burn. Hence, the globally high-selling action movies and their "politically conservative" protagonists sold to the "unwashed masses".

The funny thing is, I'd agree that at least one movie made of a Frank Miller comic book was fascistic - 300. But then, I generally find artists to be at least fascist-sympathetic, if only because fascism is an inherently artistic ideology, and you'll find a lot of natural fascists wandering about unsupervised at your average art school.

Anyways, Miller's kind of a political naif when he's not just batshit insane, and most films he's been involved in were awful.

The comic artist community is full of naive anarchists, who generally are one mugging or a rape away from full-bore fascism - and they all pigpiled on Miller. But then, that's sort of his role in that community, he's kind of a judas goat.

They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or president Truman. Decent men who believed in a day's work for a day's pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn't realize that the trail led over a precipe until it was too late. Don't tell me they didn't have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody Hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth talkers...and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.

His premise doesn't even make sense. True Lies was unique in that the villains were middle eastern terrorists.

Other action films go more PC: Under Siege, bad guys were mercenaries. Spiderman, bad guy was defense corporation CEO, same with Ironman. Rambo, bad guy a small town sheriff. Gladiator, bad guy emperor. Alien, bad guy alien, but the real bad guy was the corporation, like almost always.

"And we might repay the favor [of Frank Miller's 'reminding us that our allegedly democratic political system, which increases inequality and decreases class mobility, which is mostly interested in keeping the disenfranchised where they are, requires a mindless, propagandistic (or "cryptofascist") storytelling medium to distract its citizenry'] by avoiding purchase of tickets to Miller's films."

Notwithstanding the ironic hypocrisy of "free speech for me, but not thee...", does anything result in an "allegedly democratic political system, which increases inequality and decreases class mobility, which is mostly interested in keeping the disenfranchised where they are," and require "a mindless, propagandistic (or "cryptofascist") storytelling medium to distract its citizenry" than Socialism?

This guy is a bleeding asshole, but one might think he'd make some effort to camouflage that fact a little better.

wv: decopl - Socialism requires people to decopl reason and human experience from their wishes.

Sofa King wins the thread, although it's ironic that the passage he's parodying was written by a self-confessed anarchist who was *satirizing* the fascist trend in comics writing - Rorschach was probably aimed at Ditko and Miller and their lessers.

And the anarcho-pagan Alan Moore has probably had more true fascist movies made of his comics than Miller and Ditko put together.

“Occupy” is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy, to the extent that the “movement” – HAH! Some “movement”, except if the word “bowel” is attached - is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.

It suggested that it is a mistake to equate the Occupy movement with socialism/Marxism, but rather, that it is revolutionary anarchy, which is a competing Utopian movement.

Over the course of the nineteenth century the quest for the ideal society took many directions that can be clustered in two broad categories. There were the Marxian attempts at “scientific socialism,” in which the proletarian vanguard sought to overthrow the bourgeoisie to bring about the classless society as ordained by the laws of history. And there was the revolutionary anarchist project of achieving utopia by leveling hierarchies and abolishing authorities.

The two overlapped on certain points. But for the most part the Marxists looked at the anarchists as boobs and the anarchists looked at the Marxists as totalitarians​—​which of course they were. Scientific socialism is more famous than revolutionary anarchism, if only because in the twentieth century it succeeded in taking over much of the world. The incalculable human cost of communism has obscured the destructive activities of the anarchists, but they were considerable.

Anarchism is often dismissed as merely the rationalization of hooligans. But that is a mistake. Anarchism has a theory and even a canon: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, and others. Anarchism’s purpose is to turn the whole world into one big Fourierist phalanx. “At every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to​—​rather than alleviate​—​material and cultural deficit,” writes Noam Chomsky in an introduction to Daniel Guérin’s classic, Anarchism. Dismantle “the system.” Then we’ll be free.

The anarchist sees no distinction between free enterprise and state socialism. He cannot be happy as long as anyone has more property or power than someone else. “Any consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system,” Chomsky writes, “as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.” What Chomsky is saying is that you can justly grow your own tomato, but you can never hire anyone else to pick it.

Pogo wrote:The liberals and leftists in Hollywood continue to tell the big lie that fascism is not, was not, simply a form of collectivism.

But it is merely national socialism, in contrast with international socialism, i.e., communism (USSR, China, North Korea, Cambodia).

In the 30's Orwell wrote about this (in Homage to Catalonia, I think). The Soviet's plan was very explicit: every collectivist, socialist movement not run by Moscow was to be identified as capitalist and reactionary, the same-old oppressive regime in a new guise.It worked. The stooges on the intellectual left still believe that the fascist regimes of the 1930's were the opposite of socialism, not a variety of socialism.

Let me add to my last point that the tension between socialism and revolutionary anarchy can be seen in the Dems' reaction to the Occupy movement. Many of its leaders seem to have moved from the later to the former as they gathered political power, which is inimical to revolutionary anarchy, but have fond memories of the last hay day of revolutionary anarchy in the later 1960s and early 1970s. Which may be why they can rail against the "Man", while being such. Or, they can be Nancy Pelosi and not understand any of this.

phx, yes, you demeaned others. I can only guess that in your anger, you are unaware of how personal your statements become. Like a few others here, you make one or two statements, and then engage in ad hominem attacks, which inevitably degrade to hypocritical statements that you are doing no such thing, but everyone else is.

If people boycotted every movie involving an actor or director they didn't agree with politically there would be no Hollywood.

Hey, now THERE'S a boycott I could get behind! The machinery behind the product is ruining film. And they thought they could cover it up by putting things in 3-D. Not every movie that comes out of The Wood is crap, but so much imagination and spontaneity is squeezed out of the final product by the bean counters, it's a wonder there is anything worth going to the cineplex at all.

If the Spartans in '300' represented the forces of fascism, what did the Persians represent?

Eastern barbarians? Islamo-fascist hordes? A combination of decadent evil and "the other"? If you were standing on your head, you could see it as a parable of the Nazi crusade against the Soviets, except Miller himself almost certainly wouldn't have thought of it that way.

No, I call it fascist because of its combination of us-vs.-them propagandistic otherization, body-idealization, politicized stylization, equation of martial prowess with sainthood, etc, etc. There's the aspect of the Spartan constitution and political position in Greece - the helots, their status as the banner-carrier for the anti-democratic city-states, etc, etc - but none of that is in the movie itself, so that's incidental at best.

It's the difference between literature and pulp fiction—boring solipsistic musings of the upper classes versus the violent ugly reality (red in tooth and claw) of life among the rest of us.

Moody's tolerance of public defecation and masturbation only comes from his stone cold sense of superiority and distance. Only he thinks its his compassion and the "proper" application of justice. For the rest of us ot's simple, we expect more from people who inhabit the same public spaces we do. Of course, it's hardly likely that Moody inhabits those spaces. His is the true fascist heart of progressivism.

Moody is the typically unmanned boy child of the well to do. He'a a cunt. And he finds the harsh prick Miller's masculine take on life a threat.

Nothing is more irritating than a liberal message contained in an action movie, and, for all that, one seldoms avoids them. I bring to Mr. Moody's attention Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer. On the plus side, there was a fair number of explosions and Jessica Alba. However, what ruined the movie for me was that when the American military captured the Silver Surfer they waterboarded him. I suppose surfing is a form of waterboarding, but they did the full Cheney on him.... Every time you see an action movie, when the villain goes all maniacial and evil, he orders somebody to be waterboarded. In Stallone's recent movie, The Expendables, the girl was ordered to be waterboarded....If they did a remake of Marathon Man, you just know Laurence Olivier would throw away the dentist drill and use waterboarding instead. Mel Gibson had to fight very hard to keep the scourging scene in Passion of the Christ. His Hollywood backers wanted it be a ba waterboarding scene.

The types of men (almost always men) who have historically favoured the action film genre, it's safe to say, are often, if not always, politically conservative: Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Mel Gibson, even Clint Eastwood (former Republican mayor of Carmel, California), all proud defenders of a conservative agenda, and/or justifiers of vigilantism....

Ah yes ... My favorite example of this is The Sum of All Fears. In the novel, the bad guys were whacko Islamists and a German "Red Army Faction" underground group. In the movie, the bad guys were changed to ... wait for it ... neo-nazis! And the good guy was played by that noted right-wing fascist sympathizer Harrison Ford.